By Whitney Brown
My favorite thing to write is a travel essay.
That's because travel writers never take a trip just once. We get to live every excursion over and over: once as we travel, twice as we write, again and again as we revise. At every step, we wring more from our experiences.
But I often wonder how, on a climate-changed planet, I can justify writing about my trips.
So I bring climate themes into my essays. I feel good about openly addressing the issue.
And yet, on my more cynical days, I doubt that justification is enough. Travel is carbon intensive, and climate change is already hurting people.
To work through this tension, I've turned to books like Barry Lopez's memoir Horizon. In one memorable passage, he describes swimming with a school of orange-eyed mullet. "Thousands of them moved in unison above me," he writes, "like a single thunderhead."
The scene unrolls in barely 400 words, but when I read that lush prose, I feel Lopez becoming one with the ocean.
He concludes, "That minute and a half with the orange-eyed mullet was an experience my body as well as my mind continued to remember. Here, for me, was the edge of the miraculous."
And here's the thing for me: I remember that day too. Lopez renders the scene so vividly that I am there. I'm connected to him, the fish, the water.
In Lopez, I find my motivation to write about my travels. I don't take many ocean swims, but I have my own ways to know the planet and its people better—to love them a little more.
One day, while strolling down a Seattle sidewalk, my husband and I saw a bright orange, hand-knitted rectangle attached to a dowel. The object was tucked into a basket below a crosswalk sign, clearly a flag for pedestrians to carry as they crossed the street. Far from momentous, it was the most moving detail I found on that trip: evidence that someone had wanted to protect their neighbors, to keep their community safe.
Then there was the morning I went jogging in Limerick. I chased a road around a roundabout, crossed a bridge, and entered a green space. I was breathing heavily, scanning the sidewalk in front of me as runners do, when a fox ran across my path. Animal life in an urban environment—a chance encounter that felt serendipitous, a source of pure delight.
And I'll never forget the November afternoon when rain fell at Arches National Park, clearing the trails of most hikers. I tipped my face to watch water streaming down the cliffs, a view privileged to a few others and me.
So while I write about small, meaningful moments like these in my travel essays, I've also researched mangrove trees and Colorado history, examined Indigeneity and privilege, and imagined scenarios beyond my lived experience. My travels and my travel writing have helped me to feel surprised by people, stilled by animals, awed by beauty. Truths come into sharper focus, and the world looks more like a home for interconnected beings.
Now I know this planet better, and I love it more fiercely.
And this is the gift I hope to give to my readers, in the way reading travel essays and memoirs has made a difference to me. By working on my craft, I hope to impart a love for unfamiliar cultures and ecosystems. A love that connects strangers. A love that motivates them to protect people, animals, home—to stand up for the Earth and all of its beings.
This may be idealistic, but I still believe travel writing matters. Especially as the climate is changing.
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Whitney Brown is a travel writer from Utah. Her essays explore the ways that climate change is affecting people and places around the world. She recently received her MFA in creative nonfiction, and when she's not traveling or writing, she's usually reading, hiking, painting, or submitting essays to literary journals.
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